Friday, January 9, 2009

Dark Days of Winter Challenge - week 8

I'm blogging in a bit of a post-surgical fog this week; I had a lymph node in my neck excised for a biopsy on Wednesday, and I didn't anticipate how much recovering from it would, well, suck. Fortunately I made my dark days meal on the night before surgery!



This week I have returned to last year's favorite meal of spaghetti and meatballs. I've made it a dozen times at least and the darn things still aren't round, but I can live with that. The ground beef is grass-fed (which is the only beef we buy) from Long Meadows; the marinara sauce is from my freezer (tomatoes from Honeyrun Farm); the pasta is from Pastaria at the North Market.

This particular marinara sauce was very rich and red; it was a batch I made with my Foley food mill this past August. I nearly cried when I realized that the output from the food mill was more like tomato juice than sauce, but after it cooked down all day it made a respectable sauce.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That looks so delicious - it makes me long for summer tomatoes.

I hope recovery is going well for you. Surgery sucks.

Anonymous said...

My mouth is watering at the thought of that tomato sauce, that flavorful summer taste in January! It makes mor dedicated that never to learning how to can and doing so this winter. Yum. I hope you have a speedy recovery from surgery :-)

Anne said...

Thank you both! I put up a lot of tomatoes this year, but using the food mill really cut down on the amount of sauce. It did result in an amazing, dense, taste-of-summer sauce though!

I am hoping to actually can tomato sauce next year; freezing has been nice and easy but I think I'd like a little more room in my freezer!

Anonymous said...

I hope you have a speedy recovery. I still have a few goodies left in the freezer from the summer - including raspberries and I can't decide what to do with them.